1. Field of the Invention
Embodiments disclosed herein generally relate to methods and systems for data transmission. More specifically, embodiments relate to methods and systems of background transmission of data objects.
2. Description of the Relevant Art
TCP congestion control has seen an enormous body of work since publication of Jacobson's seminal paper on the topic. Jacobson's work sought to maximize utilization of network capacity, to share the network fairly among flows, and to prevent pathological scenarios like congestion collapse. Embodiments presented herein generally seek to ensure minimal interference with regular network traffic. Some embodiments seek to achieve high utilization of network capacity.
Congestion control mechanisms in existing transmission protocols generally include a congestion signal and a reaction policy. The congestion control algorithms in popular variants of TCP (Reno, NewReno, Tahoe, SACK) typically use packet loss as a congestion signal. In steady state, the reaction policy may use additive increase and multiplicative decrease (AIMD). In an AIMD framework, the sending rate may be controlled by a congestion window that is multiplicatively decreased by a factor of two upon a packet drop and is increased by one packet per packet of data acknowledged. It is believed that AIMD-type frameworks may contribute significantly to the robustness of the Internet.
In the Proceedings of the Second USENIX Symposium on Internet Technologies and Systems (October 1999), Duchamp proposes a fixed bandwidth limit for prefetching data. In “A Top-10 Approach to Prefetching on the Web” (INET 1998), Markatos and Chronaki adopt a popularity-based approach in which servers forward the N most popular documents to clients. A number of studies propose prefetching an object if the probability of its access before it is modified is higher than a threshold. The primary performance metric in these studies is increase in hit rate. End-to-end latency while many clients are actively prefetching and interference with other applications are generally not considered.